


till human voices wake us

by ictus



Category: Batwoman (Comic), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Bondage, Breathplay, F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 02:13:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15086798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ictus/pseuds/ictus
Summary: As always, it's Safiyah who brings her back.





	till human voices wake us

**Author's Note:**

> Based on Batwoman (2017), issue #5; the Lost Year. Also inspired by [this page](https://i.imgur.com/nSSGdrn.jpg) from Batwoman Rebirth. Title from [The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock) by T.S. Eliot.

 

 

_Have I caught a siren in my net?_

 

: : :

 

Kate is told two things upon waking. The first, is that Safiyah has saved her life; the second, is that she’s allowed her to keep it. Rafael is kind and gentle with her as he changes her dressing, comments on her tattoos but makes no assumptions. Kate trusts him implicitly, inexplicably.

“The gift of Coryana,” he murmurs, his blunt fingers scraping the short hairs of her scalp, “is that here, if you look for anything hard enough, you’re always bound to find it. What are you looking for, Kate Kane?”

Kate takes a sip of her tea and makes no reply.

 

: : :

 

It’s six days before she meets Safiyah. Kate’s caught whispers swapped furtively between the staff in the early hours of the morning, bottle of cooking sherry clutched in her clammy fist. Lady of the Island, they call her. Mother of Warlords. Kate knows she’s dangerous, and yet—

And yet when Safiyah extends a hand to caress the jagged outline of her scar, she doesn’t flinch.

“What did you have done to me?”

Safiyah’s hand is warm and calloused as it drifts down to rest on the nape of Kate’s neck, her thumb running small circles over the thrum of her pulse. “The Japanese practice an art called Kintsugi. It involves repairing a broken object with lacquer laced with gold. In this way, the break is not denied, but highlighted.”

Kate can’t help but roll her eyes at that. “A little dramatic.” Safiyah’s hand disappears from Kate’s neck as she pulls away, and Kate misses her touch immediately. “Don’t you want to know who I am?”

“What makes you think I don’t already,” she asks with a quirk of her eyebrow. “The newspapers from the mainland hark the disappearance of the Kane heiress, kicked out of West Point for—how should I say… making love and not war?” Her smile twists at the insinuation and Kate grits her teeth against the familiar rage.

Safiyah leans forward, bracing each hand on the armrests of Kate’s chair, her face only inches away. “You’ll learn quickly, my siren, that there is nothing on this island of which I am unaware.”

Kate swallows hard, steeling herself. “Am I your prisoner?”

Safiyah tucks a stray strand of hair behind Kate’s ear. “Do you want to be?”

Once again, Kate makes no reply. That in itself is answer enough.  

 

: : :

 

It’s another six days before Kate slips into bed with her. When she does, Safiyah doesn’t stir—although Kate’s certain she’s awake. Kate’s heart thumps wildly as she draws back the covers, feeling as though she’s doing something illicit, forbidden. But her body fits easily alongside Safiyah’s, as if there were already a place for her there. When she runs her hand down Safiyah’s side from shoulder to hip, Kate feels her sigh into the touch, and she’s suddenly struck by a desire to make her do that again and again.

It’s not until Kate pressers her mouth to the crest of her shoulder that she finally speaks. “What are you doing, my siren?” Kate’s tongue is heavy with liquor: she finds that she can’t speak, doesn’t trust herself to. “You’re drunk,” she adds. Kate doesn’t reply, just pulls her closer and buries her face in her hair.

“Go back to bed, Kate.” The command is flat, inflectionless; the same tone she uses when settling disputes amongst criminals.

Kate allows herself a few more moments, then does as she’s told.

 

: : :

 

Kate’s strength gradually returns in the weeks that follow. She knows Safiyah won’t tolerate her indulging in some of her more self-destructive habits, so she shrugs off the haze of alcohol, spends her days in the gardens instead. She quickly discovers that she prefers the company of the foxes that Safiyah’s tamed to any of the strange and dangerous people that pass through the Desert Rose. Kate’s been keeping tabs on all of them: mercenaries, smugglers, assassins. Kate flits silently from room to room, eavesdropping on hushed conversations, mentally cataloguing their identities and associated crimes.

But Kate has her own shadow; Tahani’s distrustful gaze follows her constantly, making her uneasy.

As it turns out, Tahani’s not the only one harbouring distrust. “That girl is too high profile to go missing forever, she’ll bring the world to our door.” It’s one of the smugglers, the one they call Sixth. Kate can’t quite make out who he’s talking to through the slit of the door, but if she shifts slightly—

“If she’s a hostage, then ransom her,” he continues. “If she’s a liability, then kill her.”

Safiyah’s face is impassive but Kate has a read on her tells; the slight twitch of her upper lip may as well be a snarl. “Will that be all?”

Sixth hesitates for a moment, unsure of how far to push the issue. “That’s all.”

“I thought as much,” she says.

Safiyah turns her eyes up to the rafters where Tahani’s lurking in the shadows. Watches Tahani watching Kate watching her.

 

: : :

 

The bonfire is a rare opportunity for the people of Coryana to come together, to set aside any animosity and enjoy that which the island has to offer. The night is alive with music and chatter, and somehow, despite the press of people all around her, Kate feels like more of an outsider than ever. It’s easy to find Safiyah through the haze of smoke and coloured lights and sidle up to her, just the gentle press of her body against her back while Kate’s hands snake their way around her waist.

“Tahani isn’t here,” Kate whispers in her ear, swaying them both in time with the music.

“She is not.”

“Where is she?”

Safiyah turns in her arms so they’re now dancing face to face, just inches apart, and Kate could so easily lean in and—

“Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answer?” Kate raises an eyebrow, feigning surprise, and Safiyah barely suppresses an eyeroll. “Do not think I didn’t see you lurking in the rosebushes. You are always following me like a cat, thinking yourself too subtle to be noticed. But I notice everything,” she says slowly, deliberately. Kate flushes at the implication.

“She’s been banished.” Kate says, half statement, half question.

“She has.”

“She tried to set me up.”

“She did.”

Kate’s silent for a moment, letting them both be guided by the rise and swell of the music. “You and her, you were—”

Safiyah’s eyes narrow and Kate lets the words die in her throat, wondering if she’s suddenly crossed an invisible line. Safiyah grabs her waist roughly and pulls her even closer so she can whisper in her ear. “I trusted her more than anyone. She has seen me at my worst, and she was not afraid of me.” Kate barely represses a shudder. She knows the kind of work Safiyah’s involved in, knows how far she would go to protect Coryana.

“But you, my siren,” she says pulling back so she can look Kate in the eye, “you know nothing.” Kate opens her mouth to object but Safiyah silences her, cupping her jaw while her thumb traces the line of her lip. “You still think of me as your saviour from the sea. But I think a part of you wants to fear me, is excited by it.”

This time Kate actually does shudder, hating herself for how transparent she is. She’s suddenly acutely aware of every point where their bodies are touching, and when Safiyah tilts her face, her lips part easily. Kate’s eyes flutter closed as Safiyah leans in, anticipating the kiss, but it never comes.

“Go to bed, Kate.”

The words are barely more than a puff of breath against her lips and suddenly Safiyah’s gone, retreating back into the crowd, leaving Kate with her heart in her throat.

 

: : :

 

The mission Safiyah proposes is dangerous, more of a suicide mission than anything else: sailing straight into a storm to recover stolen oil, near-impossible even for a crew as experienced as Safiyah’s. But when Sixth challenges her (“send your _siren_ , if it is safe enough for her then it is safe enough for us”), Kate doesn’t give her so much as a moment to object before volunteering.

“I’ll do it,” she says.

Safiyah appraises her for a long moment, takes in the determined set of her jaw, the defiant jut of her chin. But her voice is soft when she finally says “okay,” and begins to lay out nautical charts to explain their approach.

The storm is brutal, assaulting them from all sides. The rain is pelting them in icy sheets, and their small ship is completely at the mercy of the sea. It’s not until a wave cracks the hull that Kate spots Tahani, knife clenched in her fist, baring her teeth in a way that makes Kate’s blood turn to ice.

All the others have already abandoned ship; there’s no Rafael, no Safiyah to protect her here. Kate is suddenly aware that between Tahani’s knife and mother nature herself, her chances of seeing either of them again are slim.

“You enchanted her,” Tahani shouts over the roar of the waves. “You put her under your spell, and now it’s up to me to set her free!”

When Tahani lunges for her Kate’s ready, the muscle memory of her combat training taking over. Kate blocks her easily and they grapple with the storm raging around them, until suddenly the floor is shifting under her feet and she’s thrown into the ocean. The shock forces the air out of her lungs, losing whatever precious oxygen she had left. There’s a hundred tonnes of pressure pushing against her from all directions, and she’s suspended in place even as she tries frantically to swim towards the surface.

Distantly, Kate realises she was always doomed to die like this. She should have died all of those months ago off the coast of Monaco, and maybe she did, maybe Coryana’s been some approximation of purgatory—a paradise island where the roses are a little too fragrant, the honeycomb a little too sweet, the sun a little too bright—for any of it to be real life.

Kate has been living on borrowed time for far too long. And even as her lungs burn and she surrenders to the current, Kate realises that she wouldn’t have done anything differently at all.

 

: : :

 

_Have I caught a siren in my net?_

 

 

It’s Safiyah who brings her back, of course.

Kate comes to with the feeling of Safiyah’s lips against hers, washed up on the shore of Coryana. When Safiyah asks her to stay, Kate kisses her breathlessly thinking _yes, yes, anything for you._

 

: : :

 

It starts with an offhand comment.

Kate’s been tormented by nightmares for weeks now ( _drowning, drowning, always drowning_ ) to the point where she’s losing touch with reality. She sees Tahani in every shadow, hungry for blood, knife glinting through the darkness.

So when she hears a distant sound in the dead of the night, she doesn’t even think, she just _reacts._ The gun is a familiar weight in her hands as she slinks from room to room, tracking down an intruder only to find—

“Safiyah,” says Kate, startled.

Safiyah’s smile is indulgent when she replies, “you’re going to scare off the third cook in a row if you keep this up.”

“Sorry I—”

“No need to apologise. After all, it’s further incentive to tie you to the bed,” she says with a wink.

At the time, Kate had played it off with an innuendo of her own. But now, with the elaborate criss-cross of ropes anchoring her to the headboard, she reminds herself for the umpteenth time that Safiyah is not to be underestimated. Safiyah who, at this moment, is leaving a trail of bites and kisses down the sides of Kate’s ribs while Kate squirms helplessly beneath her. Her cunt’s been throbbing from the moment Safiyah asked her to strip and told her she needed to keep still _or else_ , and Safiyah’s mouth on her skin is doing little to improve the situation.

Safiyah makes it as far as the swallows on Kate’s hips before she pulls back to admire the red marks already blossoming on her pale skin. “You look good like this,” she says, grinding a little against Kate’s thigh, “I should keep you like this all the time.”

Kate makes a noise somewhere between a whimper and a groan and throws her head back, baring her throat. Safiyah takes the invitation for what it is and works on leaving a matching set of marks on the underside of Kate’s jaw. Safiyah’s knee’s between her legs, just inches from her cunt, and if she can maybe get a bit of friction she could—

“I don’t think so,” Safiyah chides, and rearranges herself so she’s now straddling Kate’s hips. This time Kate does whine, already so swollen that just squeezing her thighs together feels good but still _not enough._

“Hush, there will be plenty of time for that later,” Safiyah says. Her voice is even but Kate spots the tremor in her hands as she undoes her blouse, her movements torturously slow, and Kate tugs at her bonds once again, even though she knows it’s pointless. Kate’s watched Safiyah do this countless times but it never gets old. And now, more than ever, she’s struck by a desire to touch Safiyah, to run her hands over her breasts, to rake her nails down her back.

The helpless desire must be written over her face because Safiyah is suddenly smirking, relishing being in control. She rubs her hands over her breasts, cupping and squeezing them while Kate’s hands rhythmically clench and unclench over her head. “You want to touch me?”

Kate bristles at that, eyes narrowing in defiance, but she knows petulance is unlikely to get her far. Instead, she breathes out a “yes” that’s more a moan than anything and rolls her hips up to meet Safiyah’s, hoping she’ll get the message.

“Good. Why don’t you show me how badly you want it?” Safiyah moves up Kate’s body so she’s straddling her chest, and pulls her underwear down to her thighs. Kate’s already licking her lips when Safiyah gets a fistful of hair and guides her mouth to her cunt. Kate starts working her clit immediately, relishing the way Safiyah shudders above her, feeling some of the control shift back in her favour.

But it doesn’t last long; soon Safiyah is grinding down on her, both hands in her hair holding her face between her legs, and by the time she comes Kate’s face is a mess and she’s more desperate than ever. Safiyah slides back down Kate’s body with a catlike grace until she’s lying alongside her, one hand gently cupping her face like it’s something precious, as if she hadn’t been relentlessly grinding against it moments before. She kisses Kate chastely, soft presses of her lips all over her mouth and chin, tasting herself on Kate. Kate herself is seconds away from begging, has been straining against her bonds to the point where she’s lost all feeling in her hands.

“If you want something, my siren,” Safiyah murmurs as begins to revisit the marks she left on Kate’s jaw earlier, “you need only ask for it.”

Kate glares at her but the effect is lessened when Safiyah takes one of her nipples into her mouth and worries it between her teeth. Kate arches off the bed, the sensation making her cunt ache, and the words are out of her mouth before she can stop herself. “Please Safiyah, just touch me please, I need you to— _oh_.” Kate’s cut off when Safiyah takes her other nipple into her mouth, her hips grinding against empty air.

“You mean like this?” Safiyah asks, pressing two fingers against her cunt and it’s so good that Kate actually gasps, but she needs _more_ and—

“—or like this?” she asks, pushing two fingers inside her. Kate groans at the stretch, arching off the bed and fucking herself on Safiyah’s fingers. “Is that good,” she asks conversationally, crooking her fingers and rubbing insistently while Kate moans and writhes. Suddenly her fingers stop moving and Kate’s hips stutter, so far gone that she’s not even ashamed of the desperate whine she lets out. But Safiyah moves to kneel between Kate’s legs, pushing them further apart before resuming her movements and Kate’s breath hitches, knowing what’s coming next.

“…Because I can think of a way we can make it better.” She reaches for Kate’s throat with her other hand, and with her arms bound and Safiyah’s weight on top of her, Kate’s helpless to resist, has no choice but to bare her throat. The V of Safiyah’s thumb and forefinger fit so perfectly under her jaw, and Kate finds herself holding her breath even though Safiyah’s yet to apply any pressure.

“You should see yourself,” she murmurs, and Kate can only imagine what she looks like; hair plastered to her forehead, eyes wide and pupils blown, covered in the marks Safiyah left on her. Slowly, _achingly_ slowly, Safiyah applies the smallest measure of pressure, just enough for Kate to feel the obstruction, her breath coming in short gasps. She’s already dizzy with everything Safiyah’s doing to her, so when Safiyah wraps her fingers around her throat and _squeezes_ , the effect is instantaneous. Kate twitches in her bonds reflexively, struggling against Safiyah’s hold on her.

Safiyah keeps her like that for less than a minute before releasing her and crushing their mouths together, stealing what little breath she had left. “You did well,” Safiyah says looking breathless herself, and Kate’s surprised by how much this is affecting her too. “Again?” she asks, and it’s all the warning she gets before she’s squeezing Kate’s throat once more.

Kate’s better prepared this time, can tamper down on her body’s natural resistance. She only twitches a little and instead focuses on Safiyah, on the dark and hungry look in her eyes and how badly she wants to give her everything. Eventually all other sounds melt away and Kate can hear nothing but her heartbeat, loud and steady in her ears. Suddenly she’s acutely aware of every detail: the sweat prickling on the back of her neck, the smell of sex in the air, how amazing Safiyah’s fingers feel as they fuck her mercilessly. It goes on for what seems like an eternity, until black spots appear in her vision and she’s almost certain she can feel her heart slow down.

Safiyah, as always, brings her back.

“You were so good for me,” Kate hears distantly, and suddenly it’s as if all other senses come back online, amplified. Kate’s own breathing is deafening in her ears, the ropes feel like tendrils of fire around her wrists, and she’s overwhelmed by badly she needs to come, every one of her nerves crying out for it.

Safiyah seems to understand because before Kate can even process what’s happening, Safiyah’s kneeling back between her legs, two fingers buried deeply within her, frantically mouthing at her cunt. She doesn’t waste time with teasing, just wraps her lips around her clit and _sucks_ , and Kate comes undone within seconds, thrashing in her bonds and shouting Safiyah’s name.

For a long time after that, Kate’s aware of little else save for the ringing in her ears. At some point when she comes back to herself, it’s to find that Safiyah’s undone her bonds and is pressing gentle kisses to the inside of her wrist.

“Hey,” Kate says, her voice more than a little rough. Safiyah’s only reply is to smile then delicately kiss the tips of each of her fingers before moving onto her other hand.

“How to you feel?” she asks eventually.

“Tired.”

“You should get some sleep, my siren.”

“Yeah,” she says, already feeling the heavy weight of fatigue settling in. Safiyah turns off the light then arranges them so Kate’s arm is draped over her waist and Kate can lay kisses on the nape of her neck.

Exhausted though she may be, Kate feels a familiar unease wash over her. They never did find Tahani’s body. If she’s out there, she will surely seek revenge, and now with nothing to lose—

“You’re safe,” murmurs Safiyah, as if reading Kate’s thoughts. “I know everyone on this island. I know what they do, and what they are capable of. If there really were assassins sneaking through my house,” she says, turning in Kate’s arms to kiss her, “it is because I have sent them. You’re safe,” she repeats.

Kate smiles and pulls her in for another kiss. “I know,” she lies.

 

 

 

_We have lingered in the chambers of the sea_

_By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown_

_Till human voices wake us, and we drown._


End file.
